Yes. You Really Can Move Mountains!
Every so often I run into skeptics of all kinds who are sure that training sales teams can make a difference at the margins, if at all... Some of them have the nerve to say so outright; others keep their thoughts to themselves.
Until recently I had the patience to argue, persuade, demonstrate. These days I usually let it go. I'm simply fed up.
A bank I've worked with for years asked me to train a new group of telemarketers, young people with no previous background whatsoever. The group was meant to join a large, busy call center that serves the bank's customers by phone. The idea was that this team would use incoming calls, and make outgoing calls, to sell the bank's customers essential services that suited them: loans, credit cards, savings plans and the like.
The bank allotted 2 (just two!) days of workshop training, plus a single day of coaching for the entire team (about 20 minutes per person...).
While preparing, I found out that the veteran call center staff had been trained by some trainer I didn't know, and their closing rate on incoming calls hovered around 1% at best... Keep in mind that in a situation like this you can hit about 5% without knowing a thing about sales... In other words, 1% means the reps were actually turning customers away, practically chasing them off...
The very short workshop (about a third of what's really needed) included, among other things, building and learning two highly professional call scripts, along with preparing and learning tools for handling objections.
The day after the workshop ended (when the team still hadn't been coached and didn't know which way was up, not to mention not knowing the computer system, having no phone experience, and what have you...), they got a briefing on Visa cards and were asked to try selling the cards to customers for the first time. The result: 31 cards in a single shift of outgoing calls!!!, with an 18% close rate, and that's without counting all the outgoing calls that went unanswered, where the person wasn't home, where the number was wrong and so on.... If those dead-end calls had been filtered out, the numbers would have gone through the roof.
The call center managers called the bank's training department in shock. They'd never seen numbers like that in their lives. They'd been sure the change would be minor, if there was any at all...
The next day I came in to coach the team one-on-one. This time they practiced selling loans on outgoing calls, and for most of them it was the first time they'd worked with the software built for this. Most of them didn't know much about loans, either.
The coaching actually started at 12:15. At 5:00 p.m. I was called into the office of the call center manager (a veteran, very talented bank employee) and told that the team had sold over 300,000 shekels' worth of loans. I asked (not cynically) whether that was okay, and was told it was excellent!
The bank stood up and cheered, and I ask myself: why? How did we get to a point where, when someone does something professional, correct and effective that gets good results, we're amazed and surprised??? Isn't that exactly what the process is for? Why don't we blow up when someone who calls himself a "professional" or an "expert" fails to deliver? Why are we willing to shrug off failure and then marvel when something actually works?
As my brother, Prof. Yishai Peled, head of the Arabic department at Tel Aviv University, likes to say: the world is getting shallower by the day...